


the ones with magic dream the worst

by SilverMyfanwy



Category: Norse Religion & Lore, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Genderfluid Character, Graphic Description, Magic, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Ragnarok, Russia, Shapeshifting, Soviet Union
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-08-14 05:42:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20187217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverMyfanwy/pseuds/SilverMyfanwy
Summary: Some of the things Pitch had seen in the dreams of Asgardian children would confuse the most talented of psychologists.





	the ones with magic dream the worst

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF A DEAD BODY

Dreams were present in all worlds, every realm and haunted many of the universes. The only ones they didn’t haunt were the ones built on living dreams themselves.

Pitch didn’t often venture out of the human realm. There were plenty of deities that didn’t like him interfering in their territories but the Nine Worlds didn’t really care.

It was Pitch who was more bothered by going there than they were by him being there.

The Norns were the only beings who actively took an interest in controlling dreams.. There was a minor goddess of dreams but she spent most of her time sleeping.

Norse people took a lot of interest int heir dreams. Pitch appreciated that. But when it came to the dreams of their deities, even he could find them disturbing.

-

There was a large blonde boy who went to bed clutching an axe every night. Sometimes he dreamed of killing giants, other times of celebrations after winning battles.

Pitch never saw any of those dreams.

He only saw the dream where a woman in wedding attire ate several cows and drank several barrels of ale, then snatched a hammer off someone and beat a load of people up.

The whole thing was utterly bizarre and the boy’s lack of bother when he woke up made the whole thing even worse. Then there was another boy, one who wasn’t always a boy, to be completely honest, who dreamed of being chase for miles and miles by a small blonde boy holding a hammer. After the children tired of chasing each other they fell to stabbing and shapeshifting. The blonde boy would run off to wrestle with a snake while the boy having the dream sobbed into the flank of an eight-legged horse.

Pitch didn’t want to know what sort of twisted version of reality or the future that dream represented. He didn’t know what kind of torments had led to this child’s dreams, or why the child dreamed of wolves shackled to the ground, a giant in caves under mountains and a girl of two halves with decaying, rot, mold and nightmares on one side and glowing beauty on the other.

The worst bit of the whole thing was that the boy with the hammer had glowing red eyes.

-

The girl of two halves turned out to be a real being.

Pitch came across her sleeping in a place the Norse people called Hell, which appeared to also be her name.

On her right she was dead. Bones, congealed blood, matted hair, snapped feathers, shriveled organs, rotting flesh, fingernails encased in mold. Maggots in the corner of her eye socket, a shredded ear.

On her left she was alive; long shining hair, glowing skin, beautiful clothes and glittering jewelry. Strangely enough, this was the side she slept on, so that at first glance she appeared to simply be a vomit-inducing skeleton. This didn’t make much sense to Pitch, as had he been in her situation he would have slept on the dead side so he could fool people into thinking he wasn’t half zombie, then be able to give them a bit of a nasty shock. But perhaps no one ever saw the girl sleeping so it wasn’t something that occurred to her.

She dreamed of grey and blue souls trampling shining, armour-clad warriors into ground oozing with blood. The sun overhead was eaten by wolves, and something strange happened to the moon. The girl walked through the massacre, seeming to rule over the whole thing with a quiet smile on her mismatched face.

Pitch alter learnt that she was Hel, goddess of the unhonourable dead who weren’t deemed worthy of Asgard. The reason why she was walking around like she ruled the place was because in their future, when Ragnarok came, she would.

-

There was a song that got made up about Pitch in Soviet-era Russia.

No one realised it but it was incredibly similar to a song sung by Norse children hundreds of years before when Pitch could move far more freely among people, when fear was ever-present.

The song was about a man getting close and closer to a house as children fell asleep, then actually being in the house watching over them in a more than creepy way.

Had it been in another country, in another time, Pitch would have been more than put out by the bad press it gave, but given that the nature of and culture in the Soviet Union, the song was only going to add to his aura.

Plus, it didn’t mention him by name, so with a few timely interferences from Mandy and Jake down in PR, he could probably pass it off as being about Dracula or Peter Pan or some other creep.

He wondered if perhaps the song had oozed out of the consciousness of one of the remains of a Norse someone/thing/ other and into the mind of some young Rsussian mother afraid of the world her children were growing up in.

He thought that was probably the case.

The Norse deities had become aware of him, after a time. They hadn’t really been bothered by him, as long as he didn’t meddle. Pitch supposed that they must have sent some sort of proof or sign of his existence through to the people who worshiped them as the Norse people came up with a much nicer, much more vague song about him compared to the Russian one. That was probably because he never meddled with their dreams; merely stared aghast at them and tried to keep out of the way.

-

Pitch, believe it or not, was not a magically capable being.

He had meddled, a few times, enrolled on a few postal service courses and even tried a taster day for potions, but decided not to take lessons after an incident with a spring and a box of assorted retired curses.

Pitch was a magical being because he existed beyond the laws of physics. That did not give him powers. He was simply the physical manifestation of a concept; the idea that there’s something under the bed, in the corner, in the wardrobe, lurking in the shadows and watching over your shoulder.

He didn’t cause dreams or create them. He could adjust, alter, adapt, apocolize purely from his presence.

In all his many years of world wandering, he came to the realisation that it was the worlds and the people with the most magic that had the worst dreams.

He had no idea why and he wasn’t particularly sure he wanted to know how.


End file.
